Chapter 39: Bleeding Bargains
The syrup was thick and warm, a fleeting comfort. I was mid-bite of my pancake when the common room door exploded inward, crashing against the stone wall with a sound like a gunshot. Ren stood in the frame, his presence a violent shift in the atmosphere. He didn’t enter so much as invade, the door slamming shut behind him with finality.
Hannah, Alex, and Aria looked up from their plates, forks frozen. The low morning murmur died.
He paced, a caged panther in leather and combat gear. The air in the cavernous room, already thick with the scent of damp stone and the unnatural hearth-fire, seemed to compress around him. “Just got back from the command meeting,” he bit out, his voice a low rasp of gravel. “Effective immediately, we’re adding two extra long patrol shifts a week. Minimum.”
He drove his fist down onto the heavy oak table. Our plates jumped; my mug of tea sloshed over the side, a dark stain spreading. “They’re going to run us into the ground. Exhaust every last Protector until we’re just meat waiting for a shadow to take.” He gritted his teeth, the muscle in his jaw leaping. “And damn it, they openly contemplated pulling fourth-year students from the Academy. Sending half trained 19 and 20 year olds out to the outer territories just to fill gaps. They’re going to get even more people killed.”
The image bloomed in my mind instantly: young faces, barely older than I was when Aria found me, tossed into the frozen silence where things with too many teeth watched from the trees. My hand twitched on the tabletop, an instinctive reach toward the tension corded in his arm. I curled my fingers into my palm, feeling the bite of my own nails. I couldn’t. Not with everyone watching.
“Ren, slow down,” Hannah said, her voice carefully calm, though her caramel-colored skin had lost some of its warmth. “Explain it clearly. From the beginning.”
He stopped pacing, drawing in a sharp breath that did nothing to ease the fury in his eyes. “They called all squad leaders, commanders, and the Wardens at dawn. The increase in shadow beast incursions isn’t a spike. It’s a new baseline. Our loss ratio now outpaces graduation rates. So their brilliant strategy is to spread us thinner. Two extra shifts. And they’re fast-tracking a formal externship program for fourth-years to ‘bolster frontline numbers.’”
Aria and I made eye contact across the table. Her violet eyes were hard, the kind, mentor-like warmth gone, replaced by the cold understanding of someone who knew exactly what the cost of a body count looked like. Hannah’s face went pale.
“But they need that last year to train,” I heard myself say, the words sounding too small. “They wouldn’t be ready for real field combat. It’s a death sentence for some of them.”
Ren slammed his fist again, a percussive thunder of frustration. “I know.”
He stared at the soaked tablecloth, his shoulders bowing under an invisible weight. When he spoke again, his voice was a different kind of dangerous, low and venomous. “I also had to sit in a room with that bastard Xenon.” He looked up, and his eyes held a fury so pure it was almost chilling. “I had to fight the urge to bang his skull into the polished table until it stopped breathing.”
The phantom chill from my dream—my little flamed flower—washed over me. I shivered.
Ren straightened, the commander’s mantle snapping back into place, though it sat on him crooked, strained. “Get ready for drills in five. Then we head out for our first of these new patrols.” He turned and stalked toward his private quarters, his movements stiff with suppressed violence.
The silence he left behind was dense, choking. Alex poked at her pancake with her fork. “Well. This fucking sucks.”
No one argued. We finished breakfast in that silence, the clink of cutlery obscenely loud. The comfort was gone, the food ash in my mouth. They can’t do this, I thought, the refrain beating in time with my heart. It’s not fair to the younger students. It’s not fair to any of us.
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The training yard was a theater of harsh echoes. The sound of clashing practice blades, of grunts and shouted commands, seemed angrier today, edged with a new desperation. Ren drove us harder, his criticisms sharper. When Hannah’s arrow strayed a finger’s width from the bullseye, he didn’t just correct her. He dissected her stance, her breath control, her focus, in a tone that stripped away all confidence.
“Sentimentality won’t keep you alive, Moreno,” he snarled. “A shadow beast won’t forgive a near miss.”
She flushed, her jaw tight, but nodded. I saw the hurt in her eyes, and part of me wondered if it was just the critique, or if his mention of Xenon had struck a different, more personal nerve.
My own drills were a mess. Every swing of my practice scythe felt unbalanced. The memory of the one that had nearly taken Ren’s hair was replaced by the visceral, screaming clarity of my dream—the golden-white light, the falling, Xenon’s shattered expression. My focus was shattered.
“Kashikoi!” Ren’s voice cracked like a whip beside me. I hadn’t even seen him move. “Your guard is open. Your footwork is sluggish. Are you trying to get disemboweled?”
His proximity was a shock. His scent, leather and ozone, washed over me. His intense eyes bored into mine, but the fury in them now was professional, directed. There was no hidden secret here, no kiss masquerading as a scolding. This was pure, unadulterated command. And it was a relief.
“No, sir,” I bit out.
“Then act like it. Again.”
We marched out for patrol an hour later, the squad a silent, armored unit. The transition from the Academy’s warded walls to the bleak expanse of the outer territory was always a shock to the system. Today, it felt like a sentence.
The frozen marsh stretched before us, a monochrome hellscape of dead reeds and ice-rimed pools. The sky was the color of bruised flesh. The only sounds were the crunch of our boots on permafrost, the creak of leather and gear, and the low, constant wind that moaned through the skeletal trees.
We walked the perimeter in a well-practiced formation, but the silence was different. It wasn’t the quiet of routine; it was the quiet of a held breath. Every shadow seemed deeper, every rustle in the grey bracken a potential threat. The added shifts weren’t just more hours on our feet; they were more hours in this consuming dread.
Aria walked beside me, her diamond sword gleaming dully under the shrouded sky. She spoke without looking at me, her voice barely a whisper. “You saw it too, didn’t you? In his eyes. This isn’t just policy. It’s panic.”
“They’re scared,” I murmured back, my breath a plume of white.
“Scared people make stupid, desperate choices.” She adjusted her grip on her sword. “And desperate choices get people like us killed.”
Ahead, Ren raised a fist. We froze. He pointed, a sharp gesture to the left of the path. There, half-concealed in a thicket of frost-blackened brambles, was a deep, unnatural gouge in the earth. Claw marks. Large, and fresh enough that the torn soil hadn’t yet refrozen solid.
It wasn’t on any of our usual patrol routes. The thing had been exploring, probing closer.
Ren motioned us into a defensive circle, his eyes scanning the tangled, silent woods. For ten long minutes, we stood there, weapons ready, listening to the wind and the hammering of our own hearts. Nothing emerged.
When he finally lowered his hand, the tension didn’t break. It coiled tighter, settling deep in our bones. The rest of the patrol passed in a hyper-vigilant blur. Every shadow held a shape. Every sound was a footfall.
By the time the grim spires of the Academy appeared in the distance, a welcome yet oppressive sight, a deep fatigue had set in. It was more than physical. It was a soul-weariness, the kind that whispered this was just the beginning.
Back in the barracks common room, Alex slumped onto a bench, pulling her beanie off. “I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like I just ran a marathon through a graveyard.”
No one laughed. Hannah quietly began cleaning her bow, her movements precise, her face closed off. Aria leaned against the hearth, staring into the flames that never burned out, her reflection troubled in the obsidian.
I retreated to the sleeping area, supposedly to stow my gear. Instead, I sat on the edge of my bunk, the double scythe that had chosen me leaning against my knee. The cool metal did nothing to calm the low, simmering heat in my veins—my heavenly fire, restless.
They’re going to get even more people killed.
His words, and the sheer, unfeeling calculus of the command decision, ignited a slow-burning anger in my chest. It fought with the cold dread from my dream, with the pity I’d felt for a monster. This place, this life, was built on layers of secrets and sacrifice. Now, they were asking for more. They were asking for the untrained, the unprepared, to join the meat grinder.
My fingers traced the intricate engravings on the scythe’s shaft. A weapon for a Guardian. A heritage I was supposed to hide. What was the point of power if you could only watch as the machine ground everyone down?
Outside, I heard the muted sounds of the others preparing for a reluctant evening meal. The world was getting darker, the walls feeling thinner. And beneath my skin, the fire waited, wondering when hiding would stop being an option.
And beneath my skin, the fire waited, wondering when hiding would stop being an option.
The next three days bled together into a single, exhausting smear of grey light and perpetual vigilance. We marched, we watched, we sweated through layers of wool and leather only to freeze the moment we stopped moving. The increased shadow beast activity was real—we found more of those gouges in the earth, caught the oily scent of them on the wind, heard distant, skittering calls that hadn't been on the patrol routes before.
But the sheer volume of our deployment felt disproportionate, like the command was throwing bodies at a problem they didn’t understand. My muscles sang a constant, dull chorus of complaint, a new layer of ache settling over the old from the endless walking and the weight of my scythe. I watched the treeline until my eyes blurred, my mind circling the same thought: this feels like punishment, not strategy.
On the fourth evening, we reached the farthest outpost, a crumbling stone shell wedged into the side of a frost-rimed hill. The snow began as we finished clearing the interior of ice and old debris, fat, silent flakes drifting past the empty window frames.
“I literally have no clean underwear left,” Alex groaned, dropping her pack with a thud. She glared at the low ceiling. “This is cosmically unfair. I had plans. The couch was calling my name.”
Hannah unstrung her bow with methodical precision. “This is why I always tell you to pack extra, Alex. You never know what’s going to happen.”
“I knew we’d be out four days! I packed for four days! Not Five! I didn’t know I’d sweat through everything because command has lost its collective mind!” Alex shot back, pulling her beanie down over her eyes.
I unrolled my bedroll onto the cold stone floor, my body a network of stiff, protesting joints. The thought of another full shift tomorrow, starting before dawn, made my stomach clench. I lay back, the coarse fabric scratching my neck, and stared at the smoke-stained ceiling.
The door groaned open, letting in a swirl of cold air and Ren. He stamped his boots, kicking off clumps of fresh snow, his shoulders dusted white. His face in the dim light was all harsh planes and deep shadows, the lantern hollowing out his cheeks. He’d just finished the perimeter check.
Aria moved silently around the edges of the single room, her fingers tracing the stone. A faint, shimmering blue light followed her touch as she reinforced the ancient wards, her diamond sword pulsing softly at her hip. I pushed myself up, gathered the pitiful stack of damp logs we’d scavenged, and piled them in the center of the floor.
A concentrated thought, a flicker of will from that hidden well inside me, and orange flame burst from my palm. It caught the wood instantly, not with a normal crackle, but with a low, hungry roar that seemed to swallow the cold. I shaped it carefully, building a heat barrier around our small camp within the ruins.
One by one, the others succumbed to exhaustion. Alex’s muttering faded into soft snores. Hannah’s breathing evened out. Aria lay on her side, watching the fire, her violet eyes reflective and unreadable before they finally closed.
Ren remained upright, his back against the wall, staring into the flames. He hadn’t moved.
“You sleep first,” I said, my voice quiet but clear in the frozen air. “You haven’t slept much these past few days. I’ll take first watch.”
He didn’t look at me. “I’m fine. You need the rest more than I do.”
I propped myself up on my elbows and glared at him. The firelight danced across his stubborn profile. “Idiot. Are you trying to get us killed?” I kept my tone low, fierce. “We have been at this for four days. If the strongest member of our team isn’t at his best, it could mean bad news if we run into a horde tomorrow.”
He was silent for a long moment. I saw his jaw work. The logic was sound, and he was nothing if not pragmatic. “Fine,” he conceded, the word clipped. “But wake me in an hour.”
He didn’t bother with a bedroll, just slid down the wall into a seated position, his head tilting back against the stone. Sleep took him violently, almost instantly, the tension bleeding from his frame into something that looked more like collapse.
I let him sleep.
I pulled my hood up and slipped outside, the cold a physical slap. The snow fell in earnest now, muting the world. I walked the perimeter, checking the shimmering boundary of Aria’s wards with my senses rather than my eyes. They held firm, a hum of contained power against the vast, hungry silence.
I stopped, listening to the soft, endless hiss of snow meeting frozen ground. No skitters. No claws on stone. Just the wind and the immense, watching quiet. I hugged myself, my breath pluming, and thought about the machinery of this place—the Guardians at the top, the Wardens, the commanders like Xenon, and us, the expendable gears grinding below.
I let him sleep for three full hours.
When I finally knelt beside him, I didn’t touch him. “Ren,” I whispered.
His eyes opened. Not startled, but instantly, completely aware. He looked at me, then at the darkness beyond the windows, gauging the time. He didn’t voice the accusation, but it hung between us in the firelit air: you lied.
“Your hour’s up,” I said simply, and turned to go back to my bedroll, the ghost of his exhausted, grateful silence following me into my own restless dreams.